| Free Software Foundation launches BadVista |
Dec. 15, 2006
The website's name tells it all. BadVista.org, a website run by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is devoted to the mission of exposing the harms inflicted on computer users by the Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system and promoting free software alternatives that respect users' security and privacy rights.
BadVista.org, launched by the FSF today, is a blog that expresses both FSF's opinions and links to Vista-ralated selected news stories and review.
According to John Sullivan, the FSF's program administrator, "Vista is an upsell masquerading as an upgrade. It is an overall regression when you look at the most important aspect of owning and using a computer: your control over what it does. Obviously MS Windows is already proprietary and very restrictive, and well worth rejecting. But the new 'features' in Vista are a Trojan Horse to smuggle in even more restrictions. We'll be focusing attention on detailing how they work, how to resist them, and why people should care."
More than just a passive site for Vista haters to grumble, the FSF hopes the site will serve as the foundation for a campaign to organize supporters into effective and unusual actions drawing attention to this daylight theft of computer users' rights, aggregate news stories cutting through the Vista marketing propaganda, and provide a user-friendly gateway to the adoption of free software operating systems like gNewSense, the FSF-sponsored Debian/Ubuntu-derived Linux distribution.
Peter Brown, executive director of the FSF, said in a statement, "Whilst Microsoft embarks upon its largest ever product launch, its marketing dollars will be spent in an effort to fool the media and user community about the goals of Vista. Our campaign will ask the important questions. Can you set yourself or your company free? Can you ever be free from Microsoft? As with our campaign against Digital Restrictions Management, we aim to demonstrate that technologists can be social activists, because we know the harm that Vista will cause".
The site will also focus on the danger posed by Trusted Computing, which the FSF calls Treacherous Computing, in Vista. According to the FSF, by either name it's an attempt to turn computers from machines controlled by their user into machines that monitor their user and refuse to operate in ways that manufacturers don't authorize.
The FSF also believes that Vista represents a unique opportunity for free software. In the BadVista blog, Sullivan writes, "In the past, we have often found that the primary obstacle encountered when asking a friend, family member, or workplace to try a free software operating system is the effort required to change the operating system at all. But over the course of the next several months, this suggestion will look much more reasonable next to the alternative -- a painful and complicated Vista downgrade.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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